There have been known in the art various types of musical apparatuses and methods for analyzing musical performance data and displaying music scores with properly allocated notes and other musical symbols in a good-looking and easily understandable layout. An example of such musical apparatuses is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,235,979 (and in corresponding unexamined Japanese patent publication No. H11-327,427) in which the lengths of displayed measures and the layouts of notes and other musical descriptions are properly adjusted so that the notes at different time points should be displayed without an overlap between adjacent notes or other descriptions. This patent, however, does not consider the layout of notes in connection with a rhythm which includes triplets or other tuplets in addition to regular rhythm patterns along the progression of the musical performance.
In music, the rhythm pattern is composed of a number of notes (or rests) having the same or different durations or beat lengths placed along the time axis. The standard note (or rest) durations are determined by multiplying and subdividing the duration of one beat by a factor of power of two such as twice, same, half, quarter and eighth. The regular rhythm is constituted by a combination of the standard note (or rest) durations. However, some irregular rhythm patterns are often used in music works such as by placing three notes (or rests) in a two-note span and five notes (or rests) in a four-note span, the former being used most frequently and called a triplet. The generic term for such irregular rhythm patterns is “tuplet,” which is also used in this specification.
In general, a music score displaying apparatus is capable of displaying a music score of a music piece containing triplets based on musical performance data of a rhythm including triplet patterns by judging the performed note positions which fall on the timing of the triplets in the rhythmic progression of the music. An actual performance, however, may sometimes be not very exact in timing of the rhythm, and the respective time points of the notes may fluctuate or deviate from the respective theoretically exact time points along the time clock axis of the rhythm according to emotional presentations by the performer. In this connection, when a music score is displayed by a music score displaying apparatus precisely based on musical performance data (i.e. event time points) of the rhythm including triplets, a displayed music score may contain triplet patterns and regular rhythm patterns in an unintended mixture apart from the actual intention of the performer of the music piece, resulting in an unnatural and less legible appearance of the displayed (or printed) music score.
For example, in the case where three notes (with or without rests) per beat are notated in a triplet form on the musical staff, if a displayed (or printed) music score contains so many unexpected triplets, particularly a triplet consisting of less than three notes, in a music piece of a triplet-shy rhythm established on duple or quadruple meter beating, a displayed music score is apt to be rather illegible, whereas in a music piece of a triplet-rich rhythm primarily established on the beating of three notes per beat, a music score containing many triplets even consisting of less than three notes will be rather easily understandable without any visual difficulty, as the entire music is in the rhythm of three notes per beat and the music score looks consistent throughout the progression. There has never been proposed, however, an apparatus or a method which can provide good-looking and easily understandable music scores by displaying (or printing) triplets or other tuplets properly both for the music of triplet-shy rhythm and the music of triplet-rich rhythm through automatic processing of musical performance data.